I was watching the nature channel last night - (what follows are a list of thougts that came to mind as i watched)
-a pride of young lions and their mother are going about their day, and then they hunt down a giraffe. one of the lions proceeds to tear the head off the neck and walks away with it to eat it in solitude. (the scene was absolutely jarring, yet the comentator didn't flinch.)
-an intruder male lion attacks the pride and mortally wounds one of the young lions. (for the next 15 mins, the commentator focused on the slow death of this young lion, and how his brothers and mother were 'saddened', traumatized , etc by the death of one of its own. yet a few hours before they had done the same thing to a baby giraffe!)
-is this 'fair'? or just simply nature going through the 'circle of life'? (killing of a baby giraffe is fine, killing of a lion is 'sad', beheading of a soldier/agent in London is , what? attrocious? unspeakable? because we are human? what about the lion? what made their loss more eventful than the giraffe's?
-is only man capable of 'distinguishing' one manner of death from the next? why do we attribute a higher loss to human life, when the rest of nature is perfectly accepting of 'the circle of life'?
-man's capacity for thought and reasoning thus lends itself to aspire to a higher 'state' of existence. the fact that anyone here will designate a human loss a greater loss than an animal or plant loss proves this. right?
-man's propensity to concede to its ego is what has made the concept of 'religion' possible (if there is no god). an exceptionally clever person one day a long time ago figured they could play on this/our propensity and made himself a being of the hightest 'state' , a god.
how he did it, how he immortilized himself through myth, fictitious conflicts, symbols and so forth...THAT must be the holy grail, no?